Disable automatic contact creation for Conversations
HubSpot auto creates a contact for anyone that emails in - or is cc'd into a reply in conversations. For some customers who manage through support, this will mean a large number of contacts can enter the database. The only way to prevent this at the moment is by setting filtering rules, as all filtered emails do not create contacts. There is a use case from a customer in this post [Hyperlink removed by moderator as it linked to an archived Community post with duplicate information]
This is a request to build a "Create contact" rule giving us the option to disable automtically creating contacts for people we communicate with in Conversations.
Without addressing every point in each of them, I too want to make a note about "Never Log" (which is distinct from Allow/Deny lists, and I know that confuses some customers). I appreciate you bringing it up. It's helpful to hear about the relationship between 'never log' and 'disable auto contact creation.'
I don't think there is a post in the Ideas forum about it, but in our internal tools for tracking customer support requests, the fact that the Conversations Inbox currently does not respect the CRM Never Log list is a top item. And, actually, it would be fair to call that "Being Reviewed" as well.
We can look into Inbox respsecting the Never Log list - open question about whether that should be admin configurable, or just, standard.
Similar to auto-contact-creation, the devil is in the backend details.
Thank you for continuing to upvote and comment on this Idea, even when there hasn’t been a HubSpot response for a long time. A long-running pain point deserves a thoughtful response, and we want to take the time to give one to you because you deserve it.
It might look like we haven’t been listening (and that is painful in and of itself), but we have been passively following and have now had enough preliminary discussions that I can move it into “Being Reviewed.” This does not mean we are building a solution right now or saying anything about ‘when’ but it does mean we are thinking carefully about implementation, and doing so in a way that solves more customer problems than it creates.
Some housekeeping, since the original issue was opened in 2018 and HubSpot looked very different then
I am interpreting this idea to be specifically about when customers connect team-monitored email addresses (such as for customer support) to the Conversations Inbox and also Help Desk, where, yes, it is currently the case that an email message from a new email address does automatically create a contact, and there are currently no settings to adjust or disable that.
I see comments about suggestions for, and workarounds with, our Gmail or Outlook extensions. The way that personal email addresses (e.g. for individual sales reps) connect to HubSpot is a different (but related) system, so any feedback you have about contacts, automatic creation, logging, never-logging, etc should be handled in separate Ideas posts than this one.
One of the main critiques in the comments is that HubSpot might be ignoring fixing this issue so that it can generate revenue by increasing the number of contacts in a customer’s account. This is not true. Since the last update to this Idea by a HubSpot product manager, HubSpot implemented that contracts are based off of the number of marketing contacts in an account.
Two important things to know about the Conversations Inbox
It does not automatically create contacts for email addresses from messages flagged by the system as Spam.
It does not create marketing contacts. At all. All of the contacts created by Inbox are “non-marketing” contacts.
This of course doesn’t lessen the pain for any of you that are struggling to manage messy CRM data.
It seems to me like there are at least two camps of frustrated customers here
Those whose team email addresses connected to the inbox are receiving an undue amount of spam, and for various, and possibly different reasons, our Spam system is not flagging them. Thus contacts are getting created.
Those who do want to receive and respond to all of the legitimate (non-spam) messages that come into their team email address in Inbox, but for some (and possibly various/different) reasons do not want to manage those messages against contacts created in the CRM.
Does that sound right? Does anyone else have a fundamentally different use case?
HubSpot has made improvements in spam handling over the years. Could anyone in Camp #1 please comment with any patterns you detect in the volume and type of messages you get and where you see our Spam filtering working vs not working?
And Camp #2, I’m really curious to hear about the relationship between wanting to monitor and reply to inbound messages in Inbox but not associate those messages with any contacts in the CRM. Why is this? Does it have to do with the amount of inbound messages you receive? Whethere they are current customers, high quality leads, or very low quality leads? Does it depend on if you are using an Inbox for customer support, or maybe pre-sales or event marketing? Does it have to do with a given team email address being used possibly by too many teams for too many purposes?
Multiple people are asking for, and think it’d be ‘easy’ to ‘add a toggle.’ It’s understandable to want a quick solution to stop the pain ASAP.
Someone else commented “My guess is that it is not a simple "fix". If they want to change to add this feature, it breaks more functions in Hubspot.”
For email, at least, this is why we are more carefully considering a solution. You might be familiar with the concept of ‘visitors’ vs ‘contacts’ especially with our Live Chat channel. An implication of the community-proposed solution is something akin to ‘email visitors’ instead of ‘email contacts’ on the backend of our conversations system - we need something, if it is not a CRM object, to associate all the different email conversations to over time. Visitors vs Contacts has implications for Reporting, Automation, and other key features for customers who want to efficently manage customer relationships in the Inbox.
Thanks again for your honest feedback. It is important to us!
Any news about this feature request will be relayed on this thread, so stay tuned!
@ASaeed @I think you might be missing the meaning of this issue. It isn't about just turning off email so personal contacts aren't entered into Hubspot. Instead, it's related to companies that use Service Hub to assist people who are not perspective leads.
A bunch of B2B companies do support for their client's clients and don't want that end user's data stored in the system.
for instance, we have 2000 customers, we have a lead list with another 8,000 prospects. But we have >1m people transacting on our system. We use Service Hub for this 1M people but they are not sales leads by any means. We don't want their data being mixed up with actual leads. Inevitably people start getting our marketing emails when they aren't potential leads.
Another option, instead of giving the ability to stop creating contacts/companies from Service Hib would be to allow Service Hib to live in a completely separate account that is loosely connected to the master account.
@iamathlete I believe you may be in the wrong thread. What you are asking for is for Hubspot to give you the ability to add multiple emails (perhaps a marketing@___.com,service@___.com , or even an info@___.com) and manage them by turning off one's ability to pull emails and leaving the other's on. I'm not sure if Hubspot can do this because I never tried to add more than one email, but I see you can add a personal ... perhaps try that and if that doesn't work start a new thread to suggest your idea?
This thread is mainly about the issue that it pulls every email address and builds a list inevitably, and that gets annoying, but most of us didn't realize that problem has been fixed ages ago ... I hope I am understanding your reply correctly.
@ASaeed As far as I can tell, the feature you're referring to only exists for personal emails, while this thread is about the general Conversations tool, in which you can link channels - like team emails - to inboxes. For that part, contacts are automatically created when emails come in through such a channel. Unless I'm missing a similar feature for channels, there is no way to disable the automatic contact creation yet.
Hi @iamathlete, yes this is what is happening currently. But not sure if it is in service hub. My leads contact list is being filled with 25 odd contacts every day.
I added my PA's email to the system and to enable her to get emails pulled from hubspot to Mailchimp and it has been a mess since.
Many of our clients would LOVE this feature. Sometimes communication needs to be visible to a team but not necessarily to create a contact in the database. The ability to be able to mark a contact to be created would be an amazing and MUCH NEEDED feature!
i just spun up a separate Hubspot portal and moving our Service out of our primary Hubspot portal. It's far from efficient but it's going to take months to clean up the mess of data I have now.
As head of Marketing at our company, I have a few customer-facing email addresses, which unfortunately attracts a lot of SPAM. Having a setting that allows me to choose whom I make as a contact would be a great help. I am filtering now, which is partially working. Thanks for your consideration.
Please complete this. We currently have texting connected as a conversations inbox and send over 5000 texts per month. For every reply, we get a new contact is created which is around 30 - 40 per day. Building a list to remove contacts is less than ideal and taking up time of employees.
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